Pinterest Launches Marketing Developer Tools

Visual discovery and bookmarking service Pinterest is beefing up its offerings to marketers.

On Monday the company launched a marketing developers program which it said will enable companies to publish content and ads to Pinterest more easily, and to subsequently analyze data to gauge their performance.

RAMIN RAHIMIAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A range of partner companies including Ahalogy, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, Newscred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Tailwind will now be allowed to publish content directly to Pinterest on behalf of their clients, which are often marketers and media companies. The partners will tap into Pinterest using an "application programming interface," or API.

Pinterest also said it is testing an advertising API with a "handful" of partners to enable marketers to buy its ads, called "promoted pins," more easily.

According to Pinterest's head of partnerships, Joanne Bradford, the new capabilities are being built in response to overwhelming demand from companies that already publish content and ads on Pinterest. Other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter already offer similar functionality.

"Businesses have been asking us for these tools. Our partners are really excited in testing and building this out," Ms Bradford said.

The content publishing API is designed to help companies optimize their activity on Pinterest. For example, a clothing brand may work with one of the partners listed above to schedule its content to post when users are mostly likely to see and interact with it. Information about impressions, likes, repins and comments will then be fed back to the partner to help them analyze and optimize that content.

"We've published millions of pins though these partners already, and brands they work with are already seeing great success and performance increases," said Jyri Kidwell, head of marketing developer partnerships at Pinterest.

Marketers will have to wait a little longer to make use of the ads API, however. The company did not say when it expects to make that functionality available more broadly, but said it's "moving fast" to do so.

"The ads API was most sought after request we've had. We want to let marketers know that we heard them, and we're building," Ms. Bradford said.

Meanwhile, Pinterest is also working to improve its ad targeting capabilities, Ms. Bradford added.

The company is holding its first partner event on Tuesday to walk developers through the new API offerings.